Yisrael Kristal, a 112-year-old Holocaust survivor and Israeli citizen, is the world’s oldest living man.
Guinness World Records confirmed Yisrael Kristal’s status on its website March 11.
After receiving the official certificate from Guinness, Kristal said: “I don’t know the secret for long life. I believe that everything is determined from above and we shall never know the reasons why.”
Born on Sept. 15, 1903 in the town of Zarnow, Poland, Kristal moved to Lodz, Poland, in 1920 to work in his family’s candy business. He continued operating the business after the Nazis forced the city’s Jews into a ghetto, where his two children died. In 1944, he was deported to Auschwitz, where his wife was killed.
Kristal weighed just 81 pounds at the end of World War II, according to his daughter, Shula Kuperstoch.
In 1950, he moved to Haifa with his second wife and their son.
Kuperstoch told the Jerusalem Post in January that her father has been religiously observant his whole life and continues to lay tefillin each morning.
The world’s previous oldest man, Yasutaro Koide of Japan, died in January at 112.
The oldest woman alive is Susannah Mushatt Jones, who is 116 and lives in Brooklyn, New York. — jta